We’ve just taken on our second Dan, who joined the aTech family a few weeks ago. Dan (Quinney) is joining us as a backend software developer and will be working on improving a number of our existing products as well as working directly with customers on the support side of things.

He’s already got stuck in working on the new Sirportly WHMCS module and is now furiously working away at creating import tools for it too!

If you need support with any of our products, you’ll probably be hearing from him soon!

This year we were lucky enough to be to sponsor Bournemouth’s premier unconference, Barcamp Bournemouth 4 along with Mozilla, Bournemouth University and the BCS. If you’re not familiar with the barcamps, barcamplondon.org describes them as:

…a “participatory unconference”, so you, the attendees are going to be making the event as great as it can be. The idea is that everyone who comes takes part in some way: that might be running a session (which is not as scary as you might think), taking photos, blogging, tweeting etc.

In short, it’s a conference that anyone can attend, and anyone can give a talk on, with no advance notice. Talks can be on anything, but the events tend to attract a geeky crowd due to the online nature of the event organisation. Talks at this years event included:

• Introduction to the Gamepad API (by @rawkes)
• The failure swapshop – where people share their stories of failure (by @alukeonlife)
• Stop dreading talking to people. About stuff. (by @alightheart)
• What makes Beer Good? – my personal favourite (by @sesquey)
• Ultimate Frisbee (by @tazr42)

As well as these talks, @adamcooke and I gave an introductory talk to Rails, “Build a web app in 40 minutes with Rails” where we introduced the basic concepts of Rails, demonstrated how to use the scaffolding and extend models.

In addition to giving and attending talks, we got to meet some of our awesome existing customers and hopefully found a few new ones as well!

Following on from the success of Barcamp Bournemouth 4, we’ll be sponsoring Barcamp Canterbury 2 on the 28th and 29th April. Adam and I will be attending again, so we hope to see some of you there!

Today has been a day to down tools on our usual projects and spent the day writing a little game for Ruby developers to help share and test the fastest ways to write codes to solve common (and in some weeks, uncommon) problems.

Each week we will post a “challenge” and users are required to write some pure Ruby code to solve the task. We then test the code to ensure it solves our original problem and run it running thousands of times and display the results on the scoreboard.

The development of this project has involved writing a quick app to capture the submissions (including some syntax highlighting) and writing a sandbox environment to run submissions within.

As far as hosting goes, we’re hosting this on our new application hosting infrastructure, Appli. Next week we may well look at adding a dedicated physical box to run the tests to ensure consistency between test runs.

More details can be found on the website at therubygame.com.

As the company expands, we’re now looking to recruit some fresh blood to help with the further development of our applications. More information about working for us, and the positions listed below,can be found on our website.

Web designer and/or front-end developers – we are looking for front-end web developers and/or designers to help build & design our websites as well as the interfaces within all our applications.

Ruby/back-end developers - in order to continue adding new features to our applications, we need some backend developers to work on all our hosted applications as well as other aTech projects.

If you would like to apply for either of these positions, please drop an email over to jobs@atechmedia.com with some information about yourself and explaining why we should offer you the position.